Few places on Earth were more dangerous in 1983 than Peshawar, Pakistan. With a savage war being waged a few miles away between the Soviet Union and the Afghan mujahideen, Peshawar had become the new Casablanca. When she wasn t being bombed, her narrow streets hosted a swirling human cocktail of turbaned freedom fighters, tight-lipped foreign mercenaries, naive foreign aid workers, cruel Pathan warlords, and more spies than ever lurked in Berlin. Riding through this fiery forge was CuChullaine O Reilly. The journalist who turned equestrian explorer was already familiar with Peshawar and the surrounding lawless portions of Pakistan s North West Frontier Province. A convert to Islam, the wandering horseman was unfazed by religious obstacles, fluent in the patois of the tribesmen, and able to partake of any local offering from luke warm goat fat to sullied ditch water. Setting off from Peshawar, O Reilly began an equestrian odyssey into a mediaeval portion of the world devoid of mercy and machinery. His mission was to ride over some of the world s highest mountain ranges, thread his way through untamed tribes, and miraculously get back to war-torn Peshawar. Yet the adventure he sought demanded a high price. His horse died and was eaten by eager natives. He was kidnapped, tortured, imprisoned in Pakistan s most infamous prison, and met murderers, bandits, whores, and princes. Yet despite these setbacks, O Reilly never lost hope that he would complete his mounted exploration of the remote and dangerous heart of Asia. Lavishly illustrated with dozens of drawings and maps, the resulting book was compiled from the field notes, maps and diaries the author brought back from his travels. It includes an in-depth glossary of native words, and the largest collection of ethnological, historical, political, sexual, and religious information ever gathered about life in Pakistan s North West Frontier Province. Khyber Knights is thus a rare talisman against a world grown soft and predictable. Its pages burn with a bawdy portrayal of the darkest secrets of this cruel and beautiful region. It is a tissue of mishaps and romantic adventures, poetic passages and natural beauties, set to the echoing of horses hooves. Told with grit and realism by one of the world s foremost equestrian explorers, Khyber Knights has been penned the way lives are lived, not how books are written. It makes every effort to rip the reader s nerves to rags with its ruthless devotion to the unvarnished truth about life in the North West Frontier. You do not read Khyber Knights . You survive it

There is widespread belief in a warm and comforting story which states the horse is a gentle herbivore. What if a Rosetta Stone had been found to unlock the dark secrets of the horse s past? An international multi-million dollar industry serviced by horse whisperers, glossy magazines and popular culture preaches that horses are meek prey animals who fear predators. What if evidence demonstrated horses have slain lions, tigers, pumas, wolves, hyenas and humans? Contemporary writers have successfully airbrushed murderous and meat-eating horses out of literature. What if Shakespeare, Sherlock Holmes and Steve McQueen provided artistic evidence to refute that claim? Thanks to global equestrian amnesia, the crucial role played by horses in recent history has been lost to mankind. What if testimony revealed meat-eating horses had been used to explore the Poles and photographs had been discovered of Tibet s blood-eating horses? Deadly Equines is a revolutionary departure from equestrian romance. It is a fact-filled analysis which reveals how humanity has known about meat-eating horses for at least four thousand years, during which time horses have consumed nearly two dozen different types of protein, including human flesh, and that these episodes have occurred on every continent, including Antarctica. Various sources of corroborating data, including legends, literature, cinema, news stories, scientific reports and eyewitness accounts are presented for the reader s investigation. None of these items had been hidden. They were ignored, misinterpreted or, in some cases, censored. The result is the first exploration of the horse s hidden history, an alternative equestrian world populated by forgotten facts, overlooked evidence and astonishing stories. Amply illustrated, and containing a map of occurrences, this study challenges the reader to develop a new under-standing of the horse, one based upon reason, not fantasy.

Within these covers rest the accounts of a rare breed of men and women. Here are the mounted dare-devils who rode hell-bent for leather through raging fires sweeping the plains around them. Here are the mounted mystics seeking inner enlightenment via that altar of travel, the saddle. They are all here in this illustrated first volume of an amazing new series dedicated to preserving and sharing the mounted adventures of the world's most important Long Riders.